search marketing & Gaming Jon on 23 Jul 2007 02:31 pm
Checkers, anyone?
Think you’re pretty good at checkers? Well, if you played Chinook, a computer opponent developed by Canadian researchers, the best you can do is force a draw.
Not exactly world-changing, as even the researchers themselves note, but still pretty cool. See the whole article HERE on CNN.com. I found this line particularly interesting -
“Every combination of 10 checkers offers 39 trillion positions for the endgame, [Schaeffer] said. Chinook can calculate them all. It does not matter how the players make it to 10 checkers left because from that point on, the computer cannot lose, [he] said. For two players who never make a mistake, every game would be a draw, he said.”
As it turns out, while it seems like Chess has been solved by computers already, it really has not. Chess programs still use rules of thumb to play, not figuring out every possible position. Why? Because according to the researchers “Checkers has roughly the square root of the number of positions in chess,” the researchers said. “Given the effort required to solve checkers, chess will remain unsolved for a long time, barring the invention of new technology.” Scary.
Next up - poker. The researchers who created the checkers program will pit their poker playing program “Polaris” against two professionals for $50,000 in Vancouver. Stay tuned…
The thing this makes me think about it how despite the fact that we’re constantly surrounded by new and amazing technology, there is still so much to be found. If checkers is this complicated, think about how far we have to go with search, for example. I look forward to writing a more detailed post on this in the future, but just take a moment to think about search and how nascent it is. Think about how often you can really just type in what you want and get directed to where it is…not that often. We’ve all had to develop our own “search speak” to type into those engines because we know they’re not intuitive enough to understand what we’re asking for. And that’s the entire world of words and websites, not just a few squares and pieces that can only move one square at a time.